As full stories we can read, no words missing. Essentially I just want to practice my reading, pronunciation and speaking speed. It would be nice as well if the entire story had TTS so we can shadow along.
You are committing a logical fallacy and draw a false equivalence.
- Calling a Pitbull a Bull Terrier is wrong.
- Calling a Pitbull a stone is wrong.
Yet these two statements aren’t equally wrong. A Bull Terrier is still a dog of the terrier family whereas a stone isn’t even a living organism. When someone mistakes a dog for a stone, you can’t be as lenient with them as with someone who mistakes a dog for some similar breed of dog.
Stop justifying slop-producing LLMs with the observation that humans also make mistakes. It only reveals that you don’t understand anything about “AI”, neither about the technologies nor about the fascist eugenicist cult the people in Silicon Valley are in. Look up TESCREAL to learn more. This isn’t an attack, it’s well-intentioned advice. I don’t want you to embarrass yourself in front of people who know more than you.
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This is blatantly false.
I studied both maths and AI.
LLMs suck at math.
Edit: According to your later comment, you haven’t finished university yet.
LLMs are comically bad at math. It could be funny if there wasn’t so much crime, fraud, destruction, and a literal death cult involved. (Again, check TESCREAL or Ghost in the Machine.) It’s depressing to see such falsehoods being spread.
OpenAI could solve the Navier-Stokes equations only because it stole the ideas that human mathematicians had typed into ChatGPT before the human mathematicians could publish their findings. And then OpenAI threatened the victims of their theft to stay silent or OpenAI would ruin their careers. And even then OpenAI still had to throw 22 million USD on the problem to solve a 1 million USD problem. What efficiency! Only 2200% of the prize money.
The “AI” CEOs are all lying sociopaths, the media is either also lying or doesn’t have the technical background to understand anything they write, and you believe them.
We are throwing trillions of dollars on “AI”. This is completely unprecedented. Imagine if we funded schools and teachers with trillions of dollars. Imagine what we could achieve if we ever gave anything else the same resources we now allocate to " AI": compilers, linters, fuzzers. But those never receive the same funding.
“AI” is completely underwhelming for all the money it has burned. It’s a dead end.
And it’s all just kept alive by accounting fraud and hype because it makes a few sociopaths unimagineably rich.
If “AI” is good at one thing, then it’s producing security vulnerabilities and getting hacked.
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I agree with the sentiment, but I ask to use different terminology. We must stop anthropomorphizing “AI”. In simpler words, don’t make “AI” look like a human. It isn’t human, so don’t pretend it were. “AI” is a program on a computer, not unlike Spotify or Firefox, whose task is to produce statistically likely text (as opposed to playing a song).
ChatGPT doesn’t “make stuff up”. Making stuff up is what humans do and ChatGPT isn’t human. Likewise, ChatGPT doesn’t “hallucinate”, which again would attribute human characteristics to something that isn’t human.
It’s not that the magical ghost in the machine sometimes “hallucinates” as though it just ate a bunch of mushrooms on a spiritual journey to find its inner self. No, it’s that a bunch of sociopathic CEOs made their overpaid engineers (who are members of a cult) deploy a flawed technology that doesn’t work and (yet again) failed to produce the correct result. They should be held criminally liable, not be praised and admired and defended by using language that works in their favor.
If you tell Spotify to play Mozart and it plays Beethoven, Spotify didn’t hallucinate. No, it failed at its task and the software developers working for Spotify made a mistake at best or are incompetent at worst.
Once upon a time, we valued when technology worked and produced correct results. We didn’t excuse its fundamental flaws with cutesy language like, “oh it hallucinated again, it should reduce its dose of shrooms lol”.
In case of error, blame the humans who make the software, not some magical spirit within the software.
The people you should listen to are Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, not random websites that repeat the harmful anthropomorphization and terminology.
LLMs suck at math.
Well that’s just obviously false. I’m not sure in which context you’re using the word “suck” but the quality of math, science, engineering, programming, pretty much everything these frontier models are doing now is insanely good. They are already as good as PhD researchers so give it one more year and these models will be displacing them.
Not to take this conversation too far off-topic or waste my time any more with a believer who won’t listen anyway, but you’re making all these grandiose fabulous unfounded claims, all of which are false (“next year AI will replace all PhD researchers” “what is your source?” “just trust me bro.”).
If “AI” is so good at math, then why did OpenAI need to steal research from humans?
In 2015 already, Google and Elon Musk promised we’d have self-driving cars and people on Mars within the next year. These people are lying, and every time people like you believe these liars. “Next year AI will work, give it one more year, just trust me bro.”
How would you even defend fabulous claims such as this?
They are already as good as PhD researchers
If we assume you’re not just making stuff up, how do you back up such grandiose claims with facts? By having the humans take an IQ test? And put some similar number on the latest LLM through a benchmark? And then compare these numbers? If so, by proposing IQ tests, you’re entering deeply eugenicist territory. But surely you’re not a racist eugenicist, so how do you back up claims like these with facts, preferably without eugenics? You can’t. You’re just uncritically parrotting what the people in the podcasts you watch, are saying: sentences straight out of the marketing departments of “AI” companies.
As I’ve written on multiple other occasions here in the forum already: You’re entitled to have your own (informed) opinion, but you’re not entitled to make up your own facts, or spread billionaires’ lies and unfounded falsehoods. Especially when you ignore every fact and source I’ve brought to the discussion. Your comments are unserious, not withstanding any closer examination and divorced from reality.
In one year you’ll be unemployed because the bubble has popped, the economy is crashed, everyone who bought OpenAI shares lost their money. That’s much more likely than what you are saying. I cannot take AI bros or their ideas seriously and you’ve outed yourself to be one.
Anyone reading along, please read this:
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As I’ve already written here, if Clozemaster implements this idea, then the quote by Mike will have been a lie:
As far as environmental concerns, our usage of ChatGPT is quite minimal, and we will continue to minimize our use of it
I don’t see how adding ever more LLM-based features could count as “we will continue to minimize our use of LLMs”.
Edit: Since a number of people replied in the meantime that this quote is two years old already … Nothing about the validity of the arguments I made back then has changed since then in the past two years. My arguments from back then still are just as valid as when I made them. The common counter-argument, “but the planet-burning LLMs that are wrong all the time are useful” remains unconvincing.
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Mike made that comment nearly 2 years ago. The difference between these LLMs from 2024 to now is staggering. But just like the previous user, you’re anti AI and that’s fine. I won’t consider arguing with you.
However if they do implement this feature, or consider adding other LLM related features, people like you who don’t like them can simply ignore them and don’t use them.
I don’t like the current cloze reading, so I don’t use it. Pretty simple really.
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your comment seems to be driven by moral and not by the intention of looking for its potential. I myself oppose those big AI firms and think, that Ai shouldnt be in the hands of private companies, but much rather in democratic hands, fulfilling the needs of the society. But when it comes to grammar and speech there is simply no denying, that it is just great for creating grammaticly correct sentences and especially correct humans. It is normal, that natives in my country (germany) correct their grammar and commas by running it through an ai. Even profs in my uni recommend it because it just excells even educated humans. Actually I dont care about the math part, even though you cant really deny, that with this tempo it will overcome humans in the next years.
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Even Microsoft Word is a good spell checker and punctuation marker.
I am not explicitly anti-AI. I haven’t had good success using it for learning a language. It is fine on the basics. Anything beyond that has been a crap shoot IME. The errors were blatant. It would say one thing, I would contradict it. Then it would say the exact opposite like it had not just said the opposite. If I asked, it would say, Now I’m right. When it started spinning like that, it was a sign to me that the subject was too complex for AI. AI itself told me that I was correct in that assumption.
We don’t know yet where AI can go or what it can do or how fast. Some of its behaviors are troubling. We don’t know what the limits are. Are the big statements of where it will be in a year because people believe it or because somebody who will get richer from it wants you to believe it? Sometimes progress on something just stops. Researchers hit a wall and they don’t know how to get around it. In any case, progress is rarely linear.
In any case, any output (not just AI output) has to be verified by a qualified person. Generating things by AI is often simple and fast, but vetting it for use is not. And nothing in software is simple. You change one line of code and it can fundamentally change the entire system. Every single change has to be tested.
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Thanks for all the input!
@Alxndr thanks for clarifying.
- Full stories you can read
- No missing words
- TTS for the whole story so you can listen/shadow along
That’s helpful, and it’s essentially the direction we’re exploring with the Reading feature in the mobile app I mentioned, so that’s exciting.
Good point! And interesting idea about expiring stories.
A couple of concerns came up:
- Whether generated text is accurate enough for learners @corgwin24
- My earlier statement about keeping LLM use minimal @davidculley
On accuracy, @corgwin24 - good point that generating content is fast but checking it isn’t. If we move forward with generated stories, we’d likely look at reusing stories across learners at the same level instead of generating one per request, which would also let us run them through a proofreading layer like we do with other content. The tradeoff is that they’d be less personalized than the original feature request. Either way, the feature would be opt-in.
On LLM use, to be upfront: I made that statement nearly two years ago, and it no longer reflects where we’re headed. We think LLMs open up a lot of useful ways to practice, so our use will likely grow.
One request for everyone: the last several posts have gotten personal. Disagreement is welcome, but please keep it about ideas rather than each other. And let’s keep this thread focused on the reading feature. If you’d like to continue the broader discussion about AI, please feel free to open a separate topic.
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Thanks for the feedback Mike. I actually think your option of fewer less customised stories, but proof read by humans is the perfect middle ground.
But I think to get this right, the stories must contain lots of words the user has already mastered. Otherwise it’ll just be completely out of touch with what they’ve learned.
Look forward to seeing something like this in the future.
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Anthropic made a 42 billion USD loss last year alone. The loss in 2026 will be even higher because:
- as LLMs become bigger and bigger, the costs to train/operate them rise
- in the fierce competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., OpenAI lowered their prices to gain a bigger market share, thereby triggering a race to the bottom; their hope is to reach their IPO in time before they implode (because they can’t keep up the accounting fraud any longer) so that it will be the general public, not them, who gets ruined
LLMs are unsustainable, speaking purely from the financial/business perspective. And before people mention “open models” or “local models”, these are just derivative works of the proprietary models. When the proprietary models disappear, the local models will disappear shortly after.
Clozemaster’s customers will be much more angry at you (to the point of stop giving you their money) when you’ll inevitably be forced to remove a beloved feature in a year or two, than if you had never given them the feature in the first place. See hedonic adaptation: What once was a luxury has become a necessity they can’t live without.
I think you’ll make a big mistake if you’ll rely more on LLMs than you already do. Speaking purely from the business perspective, leaving aside for a moment all the other criticism.
Thanks @davidculley, that’s a fair business question, and it’s something we think about.
We’re aiming to build AI features so they aren’t tied to any one provider, so we can switch if pricing or availability changes. We’re also aiming to keep them optional, so the core Clozemaster experience doesn’t depend on them.
Nobody knows exactly where the AI industry is headed, so we’re trying to build in a way that holds up either way.
As mentioned above let’s please keep this thread positive and focused on the reading feature.
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I use AI to generate learning materials in Bulgarian, and that’s not a language that is much used and thus not well developed in generative AI. I have my wife (native speaker, well educated in languages) check the texts, and usually she’s quite impressed. But problems do arise with stress in text-to-speech.
All of which is to say that AI can be used as a tool for active study, but honestly one finds mistakes anywhere, i.e Tatoeba.
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That’s a false equivalence, a type of mistake in applying logic and reason when trying to make an argument. In less fancy terms, you’re comparing apples and oranges. Arguments that contain such mistakes aren’t correct or valid arguments. Meaning, your statement is wrong.
You’re essentially saying:
“LLMs make mistakes. Taoeba makes mistakes. Therefore they are equally good or equally bad. Therefore LLMs are just as good as Tatoeba.”
I’ve debunked that same fallacy in this very thread before.
I’m not really certain what you mean by that and don’t understand your tone, this is a forum for respectful exchange of ideas and suggestions. If you’d like to, just ignore what I said about other apps also making mistakes, I’m merely saying that I have found AI to be useful and my wife vets the translations and examples. I use it actively, not passively. Btw I’ve seen some quite interesting discussions about AI and mathematics by e.g. Fields Medal recipient Terrence Tao.
I’m a scientist and like to stick to results from robust research. Certainly students who rely on AI to do their homework for them do not score as well on in-person evaluations as students who do not use AI. But those who use AI to help them to study, who use it actively and engage with the material, have been shown to score better than students who don’t use AI. This probably has more to do with active studying than AI per se.
FYI I’m not a fan of AI and wish that it did not exist, I think it’s a grave danger for humanity. But I did use it today to help me with the count plural forms of masculine nouns in my target language and I found it to be quite helpful.
This is a big issue and I don’t think we are going to come to a conclusion here. I use AI to actively engage in language learning and find it useful. I also bought what I later realized was an obviously AI-generated “book” of B1 short stories and found it to be utter crap–caveat emptor.
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Nonetheless let the case of Richard Dawkins be a warning to you. He too is a scientist. That didn’t make him immune to ending up with chatbot psychosis.
That comment is ambiguous and you’d have to clarify what you mean. It sounds though as if you believe the so-called “AI doomer” narrative that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity and that is why we need AI safety labs like Anthropic. If so, then you’ve been mislead. This is misinformation from millionaires/billionaires (Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, and many more) who want to convince the public to give them more money (purportedly for their “safety labs”). If they were actually worried that “AI” is dangerous, they could simply stop developing it and shut down their companies. They could stop bribing the EU into undoing the GDPR, thereby destroying the protections that actually protect citizens from greedy “AI” companies. That narrative you seem to believe is just a grift by rich con-men to become even richer. The grave danger for humanity is tech CEOs making Earth uninhabitable with the emissions caused by their “AI” datacenters. From your phrasing and the fact that you use “AI”, it doesn’t seem as if you mean that. I’ve written enough about that in this forum (for example, here) to not repeat myself here.
Terrence Tao argued against the way “AI” is currently used. He calls the current approach to AI “unsustainable” and says a lot of insight and knowledge is unfortunately lost when we use LLMs for math problems. He would like to see a more “holistic” approach to AI, but says we currently don’t have that. He wrote an essay about Math 1.0 and Math 2.0 and says we’re still at Math 1.0, the same old approach, just with agents. He would like to see Math 2.0 where AI could actually help but says the current approach to “AI” isn’t Math 2.0. I think you misunderstood what he said if you even read what he actually said, same as the other people above who wrongly claimed that “AI” is really good at math now.
That is false. Last month, PISA released their data for 2025:
PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI.
students who do not use AI outperform those who do, on average, by around 20 points – equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers.
users of AI for general purposes have similar performance outcomes to non-users.
Emphasis is mine. Using “AI” makes students perform worse. Students who use “AI” daily always performed worse than students who used “AI” only once a month or even once a week according to PISA. In plain English, daily exposure to “AI” makes people stupid (or at the very least perform worse in the standardized tests that we call our schooling system), as demonstrated by year-long “robust” studies, no matter how much people reject this evidence and keep claiming they are subjectively more productive than ever before or how useful they find “AI”.
This entire thread is filled with misinformation.
What are you implying? Are you calling me disrespectful? For disagreeing with misinformation?
I don’t think I am. But even if I were, so far you’ve only responded to my tone, not engaged with any of my arguments (“I’m not really certain what you mean”). Responding to tone is only two levels better than insulting me. If you want to reply, please send me a private message, to not take this topic further off-topic.
What I find remarkable is that not one person in this entire forum has ever refuted a factual argument I’ve made. People in this thread and forum only
- presented subjective anecdotal evidence (“I have found AI to be useful”), even though studies after studies show that LLMs don’t help with learning and actually harm the learning experience, or
- spread outright misinformation (“If AI is good at one thing, then it is reproducing Language”, “even in mathematics AI is heavily outpacing humanity”, “They are already as good as PhD researchers”), or
- cite sources that in fact say the opposite of the point that people claim they make when you actually read them.
Disagreements with the well-cited facts I present are only ever met with
- personal attacks (“So now you’re an expert in business, as well as AI, math and languages? Gosh your expertise just keeps growing.” [since deleted], or essentially “You’re a luddite, you hate technology.”), or
- tone-policing me, or
- ending the discussion for having gone too far off-topic.
On the one hand, I don’t want to take this thread offtopic. On the other hand, I cannot let dangerous misinformation stand uncorrected and spread.
Thanks again for all the feedback on reading stories. We have what we need here and will post an update when there’s something to share. I’m closing this topic since the recent discussion has moved well beyond the feature request. If you’d like to discuss AI more broadly, feel free to start a new topic.
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